


Musings of a Sun Queen

by PurpleMoon3



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: And they aren't gonna take it, BAMF!Elia, F/M, ISOT, KING IN THE NORTH... lives in the South, M/M, Multi, The Old Gods are pissed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 03:48:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19265299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PurpleMoon3/pseuds/PurpleMoon3
Summary: A mid Red-Wedding northern army appeared in King's Landing during the Robert's Rebellion just as Tywin begins his sack of it.  Post Betryal Jon and Ghost came, too.  Elia is pleased.





	Musings of a Sun Queen

**Author's Note:**

> Written in the hour and half between waking up and rushing off to work. I really just wanted an excuse to get my OT3 out there.

Elia wakes, warm, and the thought swims into her mind unbidden: _This is the sad sort of irony that the gods love._

Married, mother of a prince and princess, and yet it is only after her husband's death does she stop waking alone. She does not know what to feel about that, what she should be feeling about it, but the gods listen if they do not always answer. They listen, and sometimes they _do_ answer. And the answers sometimes make one wish they had not.

But Elia is of house Nymeros Martell and does not cower at the gods work, however bloody and mad it might seem. With the strength of her ancestor she did not bow before the mad dragon, her supposed good-father, and she will not allow her wolves to slip away from her. More irony, that. Just as Rhaegar spurned her for a slip of a wolf girl so she abandons the pretense of mourning and tames two northern boys to her bed.

Elia shifts away from empty space left by the winter wolf, and reaches up to lay a kiss on a warm, pale shoulder that contrasts so beautifully with her own. Her wolf king sighs in the depths of sleep, and she lets him. They had been up very late, the three of them, and it had been delicious. As much as giving birth terrifies her, she hopes that their play left a present in her womb. After all Rhaella, may she have found peace with the gods, had had difficult pregnancies and labors all her life. Her own late husband's children, though she loves them dearly, nearly killed her. Even Rhaegar's supposedly strong wolf-girl died in the birthing bed with no silver linked maester to tend her. Mayhaps it was not the women that were the problem, but some curse brought down upon the dragon men?

Sometimes, in the lull between bouts of pleasure, her wolves will tell stories of happier times with their pack. Robb was the eldest of five children, and the longing and love in his voice when he speaks of his little brothers being shown up by a littler sister and running with their wolves... it is enough that when he turns that longing to his half-brother and she sees the same hurt mirrored there the suggestion came unbidden. She'd taken their hands, one hot and one ever so cold, and put them together.

 _You do not need me._ She'd said. _The gods saw fit to deliver you to each other. How can such a comfort be wrong?_

With her permission, as if they had ever needed her permission when they'd shared the same bed for near three moons turns, they had fallen on each other like their starving namesakes. Jon's fingers winding into the wolf king's red hair, pulling his head close as he attempted to devour his brother's mouth. Robb, pushing them both into the mattress as though trying to smother the scars of betrayal on his brother's chest with his own body. It was messy. It was passionate. It was beautiful.

And Elia, pressing a last lingering kiss on her wolf-boy's matted curls, steps into her slippers and steps out to begin her day. The door is guarded, as it ever is since Lannister's failed assassination of herself and her children, not by knights in white cloaks but by men in furs. It would should be wolf pelts, truly, but her sweet, darling Starks had balked at the idea of hunting the 'little cousins' for furs alone.

“Queen Elia.” The Umber man rumbles greeting, and there is a strange cheer about him this morning. They hope, her informants among the serving staff report, for a Stark child. An heir of their own. After the battle-madness and _gift of the gods_ had passed, Robb Stark had called all his army from commander to foot to the Red Keep and the godswood, utterly destroying the garden in the process. _As it should be_ , a Northman had remarked when overhearing a serving maid complain about the ripped shrubs and trampled flowers, _a godswood should be allowed to grow as the gods intend, not however some southern lordling wants it to!_

Robb presented the situation as best as they understood it, with Elia in her torn dress and Rhaenys tucked to Ghost's side as  _snow_ fell all around them, and took a vote. In some far future where she was dead, her children dead, and a false-Stag on the Iron Throne Lord Frey broke guest right in the most egregious way possible and killed them all. They all paled, and nodded, and remembered fatal wounds now healed. Jon Snow, former Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, with a voice empty of feeling and a naked blade of valyrian steel still in hand, spoke of own death by his own men because he chose diplomacy over mindless violence.

In the face of all this, the gods old or new or as yet unknown had seen fit to return them to a time before the Lord of Lannister gained so much power, to when he was yet overconfident and vulnerable. They snuffed out the threat to their homes and their families before it had a chance to root, yes, but now what?

Now what?

Go North? Return to homes that already had Lords, had younger versions of themselves or take the place of children not yet born? Or, pick from the great swatches of uninhabited land in the North and live out their days making a different sort of life for themselves. Perhaps some would have taken the Black, for the familiarity and the honor in it, but looking at Jon Snow as he leaned into the weirwood that had shot up and split apart the old heart tree no one mentioned it.

Elia's mind had raced as quick as her heart that day, while the snow fell and blood froze into slick red ice.  _Why not stay?_ She had offered, clutching at the cloak that preserved her modesty in the sight of gods and men while gesturing at the winter all around them. Winter in summer.  _I do not fully understand what has happened, my lords, but it seems to me as if the gods want you to have a home here. You have saved the lives of my children, myself, my people._

“Ser.” Elia returned the Umber's greeting with a playful smile.

The man huffed the customary northern rejoinder, “I'm not a knight.”

“Nevertheless.” She indulged. What a strange world the gods created, where sworn knights act as brutes and rapists while savage warriors protect maidens and children. Oh, they were not perfect, in the packed streets of Kings Landing battle panic and madness had driven several accidents, but for the most part the resurrected northmen had gone after those dressed in red and gold with a single minded fury. It would have been worse, so much worse, had they not arrived. “Do you know where my children are?”

“Should be the nursery, my queen, Ghost is with the littlest lord.”

The smallest Snow, he meant. Jon had been fascinated when his father returned from Dorne with his sisters bones and a premature infant. With Lord's Stark and Snow standing side-by-side, Elia could well see the resemblance. Robb looked as much of his father as Rhaenys did hers, but Jon was only a shade darker than Eddard Stark. It was suddenly clear why such a face had given even the raging Baratheon pause when he tried to claim her daughter's birthright.

_I cannot._ The Lord of Winterfell had said, strangely helpless, as he looked between the babe and the man that he would become and Rhaenys pillowed perch on the Iron Throne.  _Lady Catlyn would not..._

_No._ The white wolf had said calmly, sadly, as he accepted his younger self.  _She would not._

It was only later, as Elia lay the new Snow - _Sand,_ because he was born in Dorne, whoever his mother was, and he would have a hundred brothers and sisters to watch his back _-_ beside Aegon in the crib that she learned of how and why in that other time and place Jon had gone to the Wall in the first place. Lord Stark had tried his best to be a father to his child, but the Faith of the Seven was not kind to bastards.

But Elia was Queen Mother of the Seven Kingdoms, now, and the Lost Wolves would always have a place at her hearth.

 _After all_ , Elia mused with hand pressed to her stomach and the life she hoped kindled within, _I am a daughter of Dorne._ And Dorne may have nothing but sand and scorpions for those who would seek to conquer her, but like the founders of Nymeros Martell she could be nothing but loyal and loving to her allies.

Like Nymeria and Mors, Aegon and his Sister-Wives, the three of them _together_ would bring Westeros' squabbling kingdoms to heel. The unbent sun and her wolves of winter. Gone was the madness inherit in Fire and Blood. Her children would rule through Fire and Ice.

 


End file.
